How to Create the Best Content Marketing Strategy

Every business should have a strong and effective content marketing strategy.

As Google keeps changing its algorithms for SEO purposes, we too need to keep up with the times. At the time of writing this blog content marketing is king. And by the looks of things, content will lead the way for the foreseeable future.

We’re going to help you with your content marketing strategy and the first thing to aid you on your way is to create a plan.

Go through the steps below to put together a kick ass content marketing strategy!

Start with an outline of what you want to do. Ask yourself questions like, Why are we making content? What content do we need? How does this content accomplish our goals?

What are you trying to accomplish? Your content marketing strategy should be driven with a specific goal in mind. Know what you are striving to achieve with each marketing plan.

Write down what you are selling. This will help you have better clarity on what you are offering and it affords you the opportunity to succinctly sum up what you are trying to say.

Now, who’s going to consume your content? Come up with buyer/audience persona. We like to call it a “client avatar”. Draw a complete picture of what your ideal client looks like, where they live, the kind of work they do, what they like to do in their spare time. Yes, this is completely necessary.

Map your client avatar’s needs to your solutions. Again take the time to understand what pain your client avatar is experiencing and how you are going to go about resolving that.

Find out where your audience already goes for this content. Where does your target audience hang out? What kind of content do they like to see and share? What time of day do they like to be on social media?

View the competition’s content marketing for inspiration. This is a great way to understand better where exactly your product / service fits in the market.

In which areas can you distribute your content? Places like a blog or landing pages are excellent examples. Then there’s the different social media platform, guest blogging and email campaigns.

Evaluate your existing content. Understand the message you’re bringing across and the type of call to action you want to achieve.

Align your content to understand which pieces are better aligned to your marketing message and the platform it is being featured on. Is the content high-performing, i.e. is the content being viewed, shared and liked?

What content sticks? Is there anything that needs to be fixed? Perhaps there’s content that you should not be using and add something new or different.

Sort your content by theme & list your different content types.

Snapshot the content team and workflow. Make sure you get the best out of resources by allocating tasks to team members that will bring the campaign to life.

Estimate your content capacity. Ensure you have sufficient content to cover you for the next 3 or 6 months.

Map out your editorial calendar and plan which days what content will be posted and where.

Make a content promotion workflow : distribution list, i.e. make use of all the social media platforms at your disposal.

Reflect on the work created and see where you could improve for the next content marketing strategy